Is Kansas’ administration playing a game of Can You Top This?

Jeff Long has to be the shittiest vetter in the history of employment.  How this didn’t raise a red flag completely escapes me.

Long claimed that a series of background checks were conducted before the Jayhawks hired Miles in 2018, and no one in LSU’s athletic department raised any red flags.

“I also asked coach Miles, directly during the interview process, whether there was anything in the past that could potentially embarrass the university, or himself or our program, and he said no,” Long said. “We also did our due diligence by talking to individuals within the LSU athletic department to see if there was anything we should be aware of regarding coach Miles’ tenure at LSU and received no indications of any issues.”

When they learned of the legal dispute that was settled out of court, Long said Kansas “requested copies of any and all reported related to Miles when he was at LSU.”

“We were given a variety of reasons from Miles’s legal counsel why that would not be provided to us,” Long said.

The first response to that should have been, “well, fuck you, if your guy wants the job, you’d best provide that”.  Instead, Long opted for “welcome aboard, Les!”.

That’s not even the most jaw dropping thing Long said yesterday, as he tried to explain why Kansas is handing Miles almost $2 million to walk away from a job he shouldn’t have been hired for in the first place.  This is:

Long was asked why Miles wasn’t fired for cause if Miles lied to him.

“That’s really a legal question as to how he could or couldn’t respond at that time. But that was his response,” Long said.

When pressed again, Long said, “That is debatable whether that is a lie, and I’ll leave that to our legal people to dice that out. We felt it was important to move our program forward, that we needed to basically agree to mutually part and pay Les through the remainder of ’21 is basically what it came down to.”

My Gawd.  Incredibly, it looks like the school is going to let Long hire Miles’ replacement.  The dude’s recent track record includes hiring Bobby Petrino, botching the firing of David Beaty and, now, the hiring and firing of Les Miles.  It’s almost as if Long is doing a round of “hold my beer” with himself.

At least, maybe Long can negotiate a lower buyout in case the next guy gets caught lying.

Advertisement